Through both internal studies and industry research, users show they prefer sites with a great page experience. In recent years, Search has added a variety of user experience criteria, such as how quickly pages load and mobile-friendliness, as factors for ranking results. Earlier this month, the Chrome team announced Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness and visual stability, to help site owners measure user experience on the web.

Today, we’re building on this work and providing an early look at an upcoming Search ranking change that incorporates these page experience metrics. We will introduce a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.

As part of this update, we'll also incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility. Google continues to support AMP, and will continue to link to AMP pages when available. We’ve also updated our developer tools to help site owners optimize their page experience.

A note on timing: We recognize many site owners are rightfully placing their focus on responding to the effects of COVID-19. The ranking changes described in this post will not happen before next year, and we will provide at least six months notice before they’re rolled out. We're providing the tools now to get you started (and because site owners have consistently requested to know about ranking changes as early as possible), but there is no immediate need to take action.

About page experience

The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.

Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. They measure dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (so you don’t accidentally tap that button when it shifts under your finger - how annoying!).
We're combining the signals derived from Core Web Vitals with our existing Search signals for page experience, including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of page experience. Because we continue to work on identifying and measuring aspects of page experience, we plan to incorporate more page experience signals on a yearly basis to both further align with evolving user expectations and increase the aspects of user experience that we can measure.

Page experience ranking

Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page. By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they’re looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience users enjoy.

For some developers, understanding how their sites measure on the Core Web Vitals—and addressing noted issues—will require some work. To help out, we’ve updated popular developer tools such as Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to surface Core Web Vitals information and recommendations, and Google Search Console provides a dedicated report to help site owners quickly identify opportunities for improvement. We’re also working with external tool developers to bring Core Web Vitals into their offerings.

While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.

Page experience and the mobile Top Stories feature

The mobile Top Stories feature is a premier fresh content experience in Search that currently emphasizes AMP results, which have been optimized to exhibit a good page experience. Over the past several years, Top Stories has inspired new thinking about the ways we could promote better page experiences across the web.

When we roll out the page experience ranking update, we will also update the eligibility criteria for the Top Stories experience. AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page. Alongside this change, page experience will become a ranking factor in Top Stories, in addition to the many factors assessed. As before, pages must meet the Google News content policies to be eligible. Site owners who currently publish pages as AMP, or with an AMP version, will see no change in behavior – the AMP version will be what’s linked from Top Stories.

Summary

We believe user engagement will improve as experiences on the web get better -- and that by incorporating these new signals into Search, we'll help make the web better for everyone. We hope that sharing our roadmap for the page experience updates and launching supporting tools ahead of time will help the diverse ecosystem of web creators, developers, and businesses to improve and deliver more delightful user experiences.

Please stay tuned for our future updates that will communicate more specific guidance on the timing for these changes to come into effect. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please visit our webmaster forums.

We get lots of questions every day - in our Webmaster office hours, at conferences, in the webmaster forum and on Twitter. One of the more frequent themes among these questions are links and especially those generated through JavaScript.

During the live premiere, we also had a Q&A session with a few additional questions from the community and decided to publish those questions and our answers along with some other frequently asked questions around the topic of links and JavaScript.

What kinds of links can Googlebot discover?

Googlebot parses the HTML of a page, looking for links to discover the URLs of related pages to crawl. To discover these pages, you need to make your links actual HTML links, as described in the webmaster guidelines on links.

What kind of URLs are okay for Googlebot?

Googlebot extracts the URLs from the href attribute of your links and then enqueues them for crawling. This means that the URL needs to be resolvable or simply put: The URL should work when put into the address bar of a browser. See the webmaster guidelines on links for more information.

Is it okay to use JavaScript to create and inject links?

As long as these links fulfill the criteria as per our webmaster guidelines and outlined above, yes.

When Googlebot renders a page, it executes JavaScript and then discovers the links generated from JavaScript, too. It's worth mentioning that link discovery can happen twice: Before and after JavaScript executed, so having your links in the initial server response allows Googlebot to discover your links a bit faster.

Does Googlebot understand fragment URLs?

Fragment URLs, also known as "hash URLs", are technically fine, but might not work the way you expect with Googlebot.

Fragments are supposed to be used to address a piece of content within the page and when used for this purpose, fragments are absolutely fine.

Sometimes developers decide to use fragments with JavaScript to load different content than what is on the page without the fragment. That is not what fragments are meant for and won't work with Googlebot. See the JavaScript SEO guide on how the History API can be used instead.

In this time of a global pandemic, webmasters across the world—from government officials to health organizations—are frequently updating their websites with the latest information meant to help fight the spread of COVID-19 and provide access to resources. However, they often lack the time or funding to translate this content into multiple languages, which can prevent valuable information from reaching a diverse set of readers. Additionally, some content may only be available via a file, e.g. a .pdf or .doc, which requires additional steps to translate.

To help these webmasters reach more users, we’re reopening access to the Google Translate Website Translator—a widget that translates web page content into 100+ different languages. It uses our latest machine translation technology, is easy to integrate, and is free of charge. To start using the Website Translator widget, sign up here.

Please note that usage will be restricted to government, non-profit, and/or non-commercial websites (e.g. academic institutions) that focus on COVID-19 response. For all other websites, we recommend using the Google Cloud Translation API.

Google Translate also offers both webmasters and their readers a way to translate documents hosted on a website. For example, if you need to translate this PDF file into Spanish, go to translate.google.com and enter the file’s URL into the left-hand textbox , then choose “Spanish” as the target language on the right. The link shown in the right-hand textbox will take you to the translated version of the PDF file. The following file formats are supported: .doc, .docx, .odf, .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .ps, .rtf, .txt, .xls, or .xlsx.

Finally, it’s very important to note that while we continuously look for ways to improve the quality of our translations, they may not be perfect - so please use your best judgement when reading any content translated via Google Translate.

Over the past two years, Google Assistant has helped users around the world cook yummy recipes and discover new favorites. During this time, web site owners have had to wait for Google to reprocess their web pages before they could see their updates on the Assistant. Along the way, we’ve heard many of you say you want an easier and faster way to know how the Assistant will guide users through a recipe.

We are happy to announce support for Guided Recipes in Search Console as well as in the Rich Results Test tool. This will allow you to instantly validate the markup for individual recipes, as well as discover any issues with all of the recipes on your site.

Guided Recipes Enhancement report

In Search Console, you can now view a Rich Result Status Report with the errors, warnings, and fully valid pages found among your site’s recipes. It also includes a check box to show trends on search impressions, which can help in understanding the impact of your rich results appearances.

In addition, if you find an issue and fix it, you can use the report to notify Google that your page has changed and should be recrawled.

We’re happy to announce the re-opening of the Polish and Turkish webmaster communities with support from a global team of Community Specialists dedicated to helping support Product Experts. If you speak Turkish or Polish, we'd love to have you drop by the new forums yourself, perhaps there's a question or a challenge you can help with as well!

Current Webmaster Product Experts are welcome to join & keep their status in the new communities as well. If you have previously contributed and would like to start contributing again, you can start posting again, and feel free to ask others in the community if you have any questions.

Last month we introduced a new way for sites to highlight COVID-19 announcements on Google Search. At first, we’re using this information to highlight announcements in Google Search from health and government agency sites, to cover important updates like school closures or stay-at-home directives.

Today we are announcing support for SpecialAnnouncement in Google Search Console, including new reports to help you find any issues with your implementation and monitor how this rich result type is performing. In addition we now also support the markup on the Rich Results Test to review your existing URLs or debug your markup code before moving it to production.

Special Announcements Enhancement report

A new report is now available in Search Console for sites that have implemented SpecialAnnouncement structured data. The report allows you to see errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on your site.

In addition, if you fix an issue, you can use the report to validate it, which will trigger a process where Google recrawls your affected pages. Learn more about the Rich result status reports.

Image: Special Announcements Enhancement report

Special Announcements appearance in Performance report

The Search Console Performance report now also allows you to see the performance of your SpecialAnnouncement marked-up pages on Google Search. This means that you can check the impressions, clicks and CTR results of your special announcement pages and check their performance to understand how they are trending for any of the dimensions available. Learn more about the Search appearance tab in the performance report.

Image: Special Announcements appearance in Performance report

Special Announcements in Rich Results Test

After adding SpecialAnnouncement structured data to your pages, you can test them using the Rich Results Test tool. If you haven’t published the markup on your site yet, you can also upload a piece of code to check the markup. The test shows any errors or suggestions for your structured data.

Image: Special Announcements in Rich Results Test

These new tools should make it easier to understand how your marked-up SpecialAnnouncement pages perform on Search and to identify and fix issues.